With the development of mobile communication technology, mobile terminals can also be used for entertainment, such as viewing a movie and downloading large-size software, besides the basic communication function. Our entertainment space can be widened if a mobile terminal may be used for entertainment, for example, during a journey or in remote areas where mobile service coverage is available, due to the portability of the mobile terminal. The mobile terminal can be utilized not only to browse news and information through Internet, but also to view movies.
In the prior art, a mobile terminal can access the internet through GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) or by dialing up, and download movies in form of media streams so as to view the movies. However, with such a download technique, each mobile terminal can only download data separately. If a same movie is to be viewed with multiple mobile terminals, each of the mobile terminals has to download that movie respectively, resulting in repeated download and the waste of bandwidth. In addition, with the above download technique, the download speed is usually lower than the playback speed, resulting in poor movie viewing experience. Furthermore, since each mobile terminal has to download the movie, a large part of bandwidth will be occupied, and the occupation time of bandwidth resource will be increased, thereby the cost will be increased accordingly.
Streaming media is a new network transmission technique, which, in brief, refers to the transmission of multimedia files over network with streaming technique. The streaming technique is a network transmission technique, which, by compressing and loading continuous video and audio data onto the servers at the website, enables the users to view and listen while downloading, instead of waiting the entire compressed file to be downloaded to the mobile terminal.
With the development of the radio technology, the bandwidth of wireless data access is continuously increased, and the processing capacity of a mobile terminal is improved, and a wide variety of high-quality streaming media services become matured. Though the streaming media platform, a mobile terminal can play news, movies, or music in audio/video streams at a low code rate and low speed, and play streaming media in live broadcast services; the mobile terminal can download services and media files. In addition, media files may be copyright-protected with the DRM (Digital Right Management) technique.
In the prior art, the method for playing with a mobile terminal is that, the mobile terminal establishes a connection to the network first; then, the mobile terminal downloads the data streams of streaming media from network side while playing the data streams in real time. This method is mainly characterized by its real-time and heavy occupation of network bandwidth.
In practical applications, there is often the case that two users wish to view a same streaming media at the same time. With the method described above, each of the two users has to establish a connection to the network respectively, as shown in FIG. 1. Then, each of the two users has to establish an over-the-air channel and download the streaming media via the air interface of the over-the-air channel, and play the streaming media locally respectively.
In the above described method for playing streaming media with a mobile terminal:
Overload of the device at the network side may occur, if there are many users downloading and viewing streaming media at the same time.
Too many resources may be occupied. The waste of the resources will occur when two users download the same content, if the two users are not distant from each other and are in the same cell of a base station. Furthermore, two many data connections should not be established in one cell.
This method suppresses the users' enthusiasm to view streaming media to a certain degree, because the users have to not only buy the copyright but also pay the download expense.